This week is about the essentials. A kind soul has sold us a whack of near fine condition fine literature paperbacks: Broadviews, Penguins, Oxford University Presses. It was a beautiful box of white and black spines. This is the juicy stuff: Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Virginia Woolf, H. Rider Haggard, Bret Easton Ellis (wait. what?), Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Simone de Beauvoir. That list makes no sense but it is BULGING with name-drops and as booksellers we cannot resist. Add three new David Bowie titles and you have a VERY solid new arrivals list. It is spring, after all, the time for rebirth and aspirational living. Now is the time to stack a bunch of titles on your shelf that you MEAN to read, like seeds for cucumbers that you MEAN to grow.
If you are like Jason and you head on a trip somewhere THAT’s the time you pack only aspirational reading. Going to a lake somewhere? Bring James Joyce. Who would want to relax without the puzzling experiments of Modernism’s preeminent writer? Magazines and candy are for the weak. Of course, once Jason gets to the lake, he regrets bringing such high-minded reading. The high-minded stuff is OUT THERE ON THE LAKE! Islands, birds, storms, sea monsters! That’s the stuff of the imagination. So, he starts to steal books from others, friends with the foresight to bring band biographies and horror pulps, compelling non-fiction like Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix, a book he read in a short afternoon at the cottage, a book he liked but also didn’t like because he didn’t write it.
One book did break through this heady conflict. It was Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. He read that beside a forest and it blended divinely with things. That book is like Epson Salt, leeching all of the granular troubles from life out into the world. It was dusk too, and he had a flashlight with him. The world balanced perfectly, for a brief moment, between light and dark, and this MASTERPIECE of English just stepped along in his brain. He didn’t even notice that his dog had curled up on his lap and slept. Robins might have well built a nest in his beard and raised a whole generation of hatchlings for all he knew, just as long as that flashlight stayed lit, just as long as he didn’t reach the final page. How can a book be SO MEANDERING yet SO FOCUSED? How can a dog be so interested in the dirt on his toes?
As the author said herself, “Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”
Here’s to the exquisite loneliness of reading.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
